I’ve been seeing lots of hand wringing over the AI Photography engines released recently: https://www.midjourney.com/home/ and https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ and well… there’s probably something to that tho not the “death of photography” level but more in the injury by a thousand cuts vein. If you are interested in the topic you should definitely check out this Verge article “The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next”
“The training dataset for Stable Diffusion, for example — one of the biggest and most influential text-to-AI systems — contains billions of images scraped from hundreds of domains”
“it is much more likely than not” that training systems on copyrighted data will be covered by fair use. But the same cannot necessarily be said for generating content”
“the current interpretation of fair use may actually change in the coming months due to a pending Supreme Court case involving Andy Warhol and Prince.”
Here is a story on the Warhol and Prince case: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1127508725/prince-andy-warhol-supreme-court-copyright
All important topics to think about. My personal opinion is that the images generated by the AI engines will not be copyrightable, giving traditional photography an edge in the world of editorial and advertising.
Here is a deep dive on the topic from a law professor at Vanderbilt:
